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The Great Kony con

Kony is portrayed in this poster as the latest ogre on evil's evolutionary plane

CUE thousands of 13 to 21 year old Americans clad in
t-shirts emblazoned with the image of notorious Ugandan terrorist Joseph Kony,
modelled on Barack Obama’s ‘Hope’ poster from his 2008 election campaign. But
Kony’s has two other figures in the background: Adolf Hitler and Osama bin
Laden, clearly suggesting that Kony is the latest spawn on evil’s evolutionary
plane. Their mission? To make the egregious Lord’s Resistance Army leader ‘famous’
and thus sustain public support of the US military’s deployment in central
Africa ostensibly to help capture Kony and bring him to justice.

This is the footage from a newly released controversial 30-minute
documentary produced by the American charity Invisible Children. It has since
gone viral, accounting for more than 85 million views on the video sharing site
Youtube. Unsurprisingly, many reviewers have roundly condemned it as a
psychological operations piece for US
military intervention in central Africa.
Invisible Children is fronted by 33 year-old Jason Russell, whose work with
children traumatised by LRA raids among the Acholi communities of northern Uganda inspired
him to set up the charity.

Using slick production techniques and a simplistic narrative
riding on good guy-bad guy binaries, the film invokes the default paternalism of
some western humanitarian agencies towards ‘helpless’ Africa.
Agency for the resolution of the identified crisis is exported to the west, and
Africans appear only as victims and advocates offering plaintive calls for
help. The heartrending story of its Ugandan child protagonist, Jacob Acaye, who
was abducted into Kony’s army and forced to watch his brother killed, is the
big stick with which the film clobbers the moral conscience of its youthful viewers.
It then challenges them to assuage their assaulted sense of humanity by taking ‘social
action to end the use of child soldiers […] and restore LRA-affected
communities in central Africa to peace and
prosperity’.

There are other founded criticisms levelled against the
film, which was both narrated and directed by Russell. The first is that it
inaccurately lays all the blame for the atrocities committed against northern
Ugandan civilians on Kony’s LRA alone and totally absolves President Yoweri
Museveni’s government of any wrongdoing. Human rights campaigners have
documented and highlighted the atrocities of Museveni’s government against the
Acholi people, including his policy of forcibly herding them into ‘protective
camps’, where many of them fell sick and died.

‘Young adults recall the time from the mid-90s when over 80
per cent of the total population of three Acholi districts was forcibly
interned in camps – the government claimed it was to ‘protect’ them from the
LRA,’ wrote world renowned Ugandan academic and Makerere University professor,
Mahmood Mamdani. ‘But there were allegations of murder, bombing, and burning of
entire villages, first to force people into the camps and then to force them to
stay put.’

According to figures from Uganda’s own health ministry, the
excess mortality rate in these camps was approximately 1000 persons per week, a
staggering statistic comparable to those killed by the LRA in the worst year.

Secondly, the campaign to get Kony appears anachronistic
given that conflict in northern Uganda
has largely quietened and Kony himself is widely believed to have long since
left Uganda.
The country’s Prime Minister, smarting from the negative publicity generated
around the image of his country, adopted the same social media techniques
employed by Invisible Children to issue a rebuttal of their claims.

Jacob Acaye: the film looks at the plight of the children through his story

In a nine minute Youtube video, Amama Mbabazi said, ‘The
Kony 2012 campaign fails to make one crucial point clear. Joseph Kony is not in
Uganda.’
Proving as much a social media literate as Invisible Children itself, Mbabazi
then took to Twitter to call out the same celebrities the charity had targeted
in its campaign – the likes of Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Ryan Seacrest - and
invited them to ‘visit our proud nation and see the peace that exists’.

As if spurred by the Kony 2012 campaign, the African Union
late last month announced the deployment of a 5000-strong force into central Africa to hunt for Kony and his LRA militants. The force,
comprising troops from Uganda,
the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic,
will be under Ugandan command. Francisco Madeira, the AU’s special envoy for
the LRA, was quoted by Al-Jazeera as saying that the force would be based in
the South Sudan city of Yambio,
close to the border with the DRC.

In response to questions about how long the mission would
last, Madeira said: ‘When we capture Kony or
he hands himself in or we neutralise him in some way; that will be the end.
That’s the timeframe.’ But what is the LRA that it should merit such an
open-ended military campaign akin to the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, obviously at
huge cost? Mamdani says the LRA is now no more than ‘a raggedy bunch of a few
hundreds at most, poorly equipped, poorly armed, and poorly trained. Their
ranks mainly comprise those kidnapped as children and then turned into
tormentors. It is a story not very different from that of abused children who
in time turn into abusive adults. In short, the LRA is no military power.’

He argues that addressing ‘the problem called the LRA does
not call for a military operation’. Indeed, many observers have queried the
basis of the proposed rapid military mobilisation in the central African region
and feel strongly unconvinced that the LRA is the reason for it. President
Barack Obama’s deployment late last year of 100 US special forces to the region to
assist this would-be AU force in the hunt for Kony under the aegis of the
United States Africa Command (Africom) casts a dark shadow over this Kony
brouhaha.

It is in this context that Invisible Children’s role in the
get-Kony-campaign becomes less a naïve and innocuous action than it is a
deliberate call for military intervention on the pretext of humanitarianism. Adam
Branch, a senior research fellow at Makerere, said because of the charity’s ‘irresponsible
advocacy, civilians in Uganda and central Africa may have to pay a steep price
in their own lives so that a lot of young Americans can feel good about
themselves, and a few can make good money.’

And money does loom large in Invisible Children’s profile.
The Guardian revealed the charity to be a ‘cash-rich operation’ whose annual
income in 2011 tripled to nearly $9m from foundations as well as personal
donations. A quarter of this was spent on travel and film-making, $1.7m went to
US employee salaries, $850,000 in film production costs, $244,000 in
‘professional services’, and $1.07 million in travel expenses.

Branch described Invisible Children as ‘useful idiots’ who
are being used by ‘those in the US government who seek to militarise Africa, to
send more weapons and military aid to the continent, and to build the power of
states that are US allies’. ‘The hunt for Joseph Kony is the perfect excuse for
this strategy—how often does the US government find millions of young Americans
pleading that they intervene militarily in a place rich in oil and other
resources?’

American writer F. William Engdahl wrote recently that the
Joseph Kony crusade ‘appears to be a flank in a major Africom and US State
Department campaign especially to undermine Chinese influence in central Africa
-- now that they have successfully driven the Chinese oil companies out of
Libya, and carved out a new “republic” of South Sudan containing much of the
oil that fuels China’s economy.’

‘That splitting of South Sudan and its oil, for those who
did not follow it closely, was a consequence of sending in US and NATO special
forces to ‘stop genocide’ in Darfur,’ he
claimed.

Branch said the most serious problems northern Ugandans face
today have little to do with Kony. ‘The most pressing are over land. Land
speculators and so-called investors, many foreign, in collaboration with the
Ugandan government and military, are grabbing the land of the Acholi people in
northern Uganda, land that they were forced off a decade ago when the
government herded them into internment camps,’ he said.

The US
has reason to be impressed by the progress of its military and strategic
objectives so far in central/east Africa. Uganda, Ethiopia
and Kenya
have all been willingly conscripted into American proxies in its war on terror.
All three countries have sent their armies into Somalia to battle Islamic
extremists. Uganda in
particular, has recently received $45m in military support from the US, with the
promise of more. Africom is keen to move its headquarters from Germany to the continent where its strategic
objectives include ensuring supply lines for energy and other materials from
the continent, and to checkmate the rise of China
in Africa. Africa is now a region of vital
importance to national security in the US.

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Comments

I've returned to Zimbabwe despite having been raised in the UK. Although the decision as your post says is a personal one I do believe African attitudes continue to shape reality. UK or US being a land of milk and honey is not god given or a fact of nature. Diasporans, I think, need to do more to change the reality back home rather than using it as an excuse to stay away from home. Otherwise you come across as nothing more than a consumer waiting for 'perfect' conditions before you return.

Also, I agree that success stories of returnees will help so I'm gonna do my bit!

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